The last five years of EU politics have seen no shortage of crisis. When Ursula von der Leyen stepped into her first term as European Commission president, Brexit was reaching its climax and the migration crisis was still ongoing. Then came the COVID-19 pandemic, war and inflation.
Von der Leyen has been able to use these extraordinary circumstances to consolidate her own power, and that of the executive she leads.
This political manoeuvring earned her Forbes’ “World’s most powerful women” two years in a row. It also saddled her and her college of commissioners with scandal — something she was no stranger to in her previous role as German defence minister.
Now, von der Leyen enters her second mandate leading a Commission which, if anything like her first, will be unafraid to act.
“You never thought that the institution that has been described as being overly bureaucratic, slow, full of inertia and decisions by consensus will never move quickly,” Dharmendra Kanani, spokesperson for Friends of Europe, an EU-focused policy think tank, told The Parliament. “And suddenly — bang.”
Sidelining the EP
During her first term, the Commission sometimes acted almost omnipotently. Going beyond its traditional role of proposing legislation, it seized special powers allowing it to pass legislation it saw as essential to getting the bloc through the pandemic and the economic downturn it caused.
Critics called out the Commission for what they viewed as sidestepping democratic checks and balances. An executive, however, can almost always act faster than hundreds of lawmakers in the legislative branch.
“If there is a lot of time pressure, like a crisis situation, then I guess mistakes happen, but that is to some extent unavoidable,” Stefan Lehne, a senior fellow at Carnegie Europe, told The Parliament. “In an urgent situation, you have to move much more quickly.”
The Commission's speed was grounded legally in Article 122 of the Lisbon Treaty, which forms the constitutional basis of the EU. The article permits the EU to adopt swift, exceptional measures in situations of economic emergency or natural disasters. By vesting more legislating power in the European Council and Commission, the measure sidelines the European Parliament — the only body directly elected by EU citizens.
For lawmakers, its increased use is a worrying sign.
“The Commission is trying to use instruments which are limiting the full power of the committees, like urgency procedures,” Bernd Lange, chair of the EP’s Conference of Committee Chairs, told The Parliament, referring to Article 122, which he called “not a favoured procedure.”
The EP’s Committee on Constitutional Affairs has announced it will give Article 122 more scrutiny in the new mandate, to ensure it is not being used as a power grab. In an op-ed for The Parliament, committee chair Sven Simon argued that the Commission must be obliged to justify its use of the article to the EP.
Rule-of-law advocates have called for similar transparency.
“The Commission and the Council have not produced an annual report, nor supported independent review, in respect of the rule of law situation at EU level,” a recent report by the Democracy Institute at Central European University found.
Reinventing the EP
Electoral shifts since June’s parliamentary elections have also led to a plateauing of the EP’s power. With an emboldened far right flexing its muscles, a more divided parliament has led to more debate and less cohesion.
“The Parliament needs to be more self-reflective and rather than criticise the Commission, it should be thinking about how it's behaving,” Kanani, from Friends of Europe, said.
Instead, he added, some MEPs have become more focused on their national interests than collective ones. During commissioner-designate hearings, for example, Spanish members of the centre-right European People's Party refused to vote for Teresa Ribera, the country's ecological minister up for a vice president role in the new Commission, despite an agreement to do so. They blamed her for the Spanish government's slow response to deadly floods. This political pettiness culminated in the EPP refusing to applaud von der Leyen's announcement of Ribera in the chamber in Strasbourg.
Treaty change would be the most secure way to protect the institution’s power, but Carnegie’s Lehne said that could be risky and member states are not keen to do that. That leaves less formal efforts like bargaining with the Commission over specific powers or asking member states in the Council for more co-decision powers.
“The European Parliament always depended somehow on this series of treaty changes that increased its power more and more, and I think that is a problem for them,” added Lehne.
Commission: Be careful what you wish for
With the centre of EU power tilted towards the Commission, the question is what von der Leyen does with it. A flurry of legislation that passed during her first mandate now needs to become reality.
“It has to be the implementation Commission,” Kanani said. "We have to move beyond policy mantras to actually making this happen.”
The Commission however could feel pressure from member states reluctant to let too many decrees come out of Berlaymont. National governments across the bloc are moving increasingly to the right and are less keen on empowering Europe's executive branch.
“They would very much like to shift the kind of power back to the member states and to the Council,” Lehne said.
Member states could do that by tightening the Commission's purse strings. At a time of sluggish growth for many member economies and calls to invest in an array of policy priorities, expect fierce debate over the next multi-year EU budget.
Together, that means that von der Leyen is hardly assured to have as successful a second term as her first — at least as far as power and influence are concerned.
“It's not entirely impossible that von der Leyen will very much regret having run again as she might be confronted with a situation that looks much less like a success than her first,” Lehne said.